gradient wallpapers can be tricky with android, they look awesome, but when you first try making one you'll find some horrific banding occurs, this can be avoided by adding the *tiniest* amount of noise. so when you make your own, 640x480 and a pinch of noise.

the main widget:

beautiful widgets has thousands of options and skins for every widget you can imagine. but most of them are terrible [in my opinion]. the one i landed on was 'blackcashmere' for the clock skin [obviously with the background alpha'd out] and 'tick' for the weather skin. but there are skins for every look you could want to try.

extended controls:

another widget with a lot of customisation, but for my simple look, most of it is removed. this is useful for turning on/off all those battery munching features like gps, with some cooler features like disabling auto rotate and a torch mode.

launcher pro:

this is the thing changes *everything*. anything you can think of is changeable with this launcher, number of home screens, transition effects, the all programs thing, the dock and a thousand little things i didn't know i cared about. the main thing is i got to remove the incredibly clunky htc dock [the bottom bar] and replace it with my most used apps and settings.

the launcher pro dock supports scrolling, which is completely optional, but it allows me to hide all my settings off my home screen, but still easy to access.

the main thing is not to blindly follow what i've done. there are so many little customisations that you can make to android which just make it... nice, and considering how much time you're likely to spend using your phone, it just makes sense to throw some time at it to make it... nice.